@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org you must be loved by all the web developers in town! But ok, I have added all the missing semicolons, that should technically be there, but them not being there, does not make a difference.

Font color change inside every summary element, was a very deliberate choice, to color the text, but leave the arrow black (same as website background). But ok, I rewrote the CSS to hide the arrows and make all summaries white - since this also works better, with some dark theme enforcing browser extensions.

HOWEVER “p” as a child element of “summary” is a thing, that as far as I know, all browsers respect and if a font color is applied only once, I don’t think it matters, if it’s done through HTML or CSS, you smart ass.

There’s a secret art easter egg thing, hidden on my website ( https://thecanine.ueuo.com ), for this years April fools event - it’s been there for a few weeks, but now I can finally give hints.

If I get one like, I’ll change my websites name, to “Anime dog fights” - for no particular reason

Quickly sketched up a mini version of my profile picture last night and I liked it enough to complete it. I’ll even try it as a profile pic. Why not.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org back in the good old days, when browsers let you choose between loading a site with or without SSL, the font was way more optional, as the HTTP version doesn’t have it.

“hypnofontregular” is still loaded through CSS. In the ideal world, browsers would have the toggle, to not load fonts, more accessible.

The site should still look good without it, but I have not tested it in a while, as everyone is more or less forced to use it with the fancy font, by their own browser.

Bit of an update, there is now a general licence for all my stuff:

“Unless projects are accompanied by a different license, Creative Commons apply (“BY-NC-ND” for all art featuring the Canine mascot and “BY-NC” for everything else).”

It’s even included on my website, where most of the demand for a clear licence originated from:

In practice this changes nothing, as I was never enforcing anything more than this anyway and given permission for other use too. Now it’s just official that this is the baseline, of what can be done, without having to ask for permission first.

If you have even a passing interest in what, or rather who is the cause of (not just) Googles enshitification and 15 to 30 minutes to spare, I would strongly recommended reading The Man Who Killed Google Search, or listening to the podcast episode, linked at the very top of the page.

It needs to be emphasised, the majority of these changes for the worse, are not an accident. They’re done very deliberately by cockroaches, seeking short-term profits, they can take a big chunk of, only to jump ship to another company and let everyone else, suffer the long term consequences of their actions.

Forgot you can actually apply CSS, based on display aspect ratio, rather than min width. Very underrated feature.

“Secret” because it’s part of the easteregg, I’m getting ready for April 1st.

HeliBoard might be the first one of these fully open source Android keyboards, that doesn’t suck, idk, I’m still in the process of testing it, but I already like it a lot more than any of the ones I used before it.

Setting it up was somewhat clunky, but once you set it all up and dile in the settings, the keyboard itself, feels really great to use.

I spent this Monday afternoon back from work, drawing myself as the “you made it to Friday sailors” dog. Totally unrelated to the 3 hours wasted on meetings, pretending to discuss great suggestions from high management, nobody else wants to implement.
Link to OG meme: https://youtu.be/z8x3JS7pP14

Feels like a wider problem with the Internet and to some extent computing as a whole. I’m not advocating for elitism or hostile design, but things are being dumbed down to a ridiculous extent - everyone is encouraged to use their computer as a social media box, streaming + gaming console, not learning how it works (even at the most surface level), no more making your own website, your game you never finish, your collection of media in various file formats… When there is an error, you get a generic error message, the networking app is afraid to let the user come into contact with any networking, past scanning the WiFi QR code or plugging in the Internet cable.

Back when I was in primary school, everyone wanted to run their own personal blog website about nonsense nobody else cared about, downloaded songs, movies, games they had to solve problems to run. Maybe we should once again encourage people to think, at least a little.

develop app
do video streaming
test on Windows
works on Chromium (Chromium, Chrome, Edge, Opera,…) doesn’t work on Firefox
think “surely it’s Chromium/blink compatible, Gecko is what we need to focus on
test on MacOS
Safari broken, Edge broken, Firefox broken, Chrome functions perfectly
GOTTA LOVE THOSE WEB STANDARDS!

@prologic@twtxt.net careful, if you provide too much feedback, your feedback button might also disappear. 🫠 Also recently celebrated the 1st anniversary of the MS Teams multilingual spellchecker bug, Microsoft actually acknowledged and promised us to fix. And by “bug”, I mean it being completely broken.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org it is the same as my current avatar here, the original pixelart is 51x51 (including the empty lines and columns, to ensure it doesn’t get covered, when it’s shown through a circular cutout).

For some reason, Jira has two identical avatars for each user, with different resolutions (48x48 and 24x24), depending on where in the app they’re shown. Jira also comes with SVG ones, but custom SVGs cannot be added by users.

This also cannot possibly be to save space for Atlassian, because if you also have an Atlassian account for Confluence, there’s yet another avatar type, that’s 256x256 and can be different than the two identical small Jira ones.

Lastly Jira profile pictures can have transparent background, but the Confluence ones cannot.

@prologic@twtxt.net I become part of the automotive industry IT, so now I do morally neutral things and earn average money.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org really happy you and others still find and enjoy them, despite my extremely irregular and infrequent posts here.

The impossible happened, and I actually drew something, second month in a row. Wanted to try drawing him standing, with some semblance of correct anatomy, without heavily referencing someone elses drawing, bring back the collar, darker “hair” and separate every different color, with a black line - for some kind of a more simplified look.

Merry Christmas everyone! Have a very low resolution sitting canine, to end this year with.

Years ago, I had a falling out with PayPal, when they implemented ToS changes, that would let them withhold your money without a reason and randomly subtract “ToS violation fees” from your balance.

They reverted the ToS violation fees part, but I refuse to do business with any company, who has the goal, to even try presenting such a change, to their clients.

I’m not surprised PayPal is alongside questionable fee increases, also running scummy browser extensions (through companies they acquired), that override almost all affiliate links with PayPals and present you with inferior discount coupons, to trick you into spending more money, shopping on sites owned by their partners.

The honey extension scam - YouTube video

Ironic they were even “referal link scamming” the influencers, they paid to promote their extension - PayPals ability to scam the clueless is quite impressive, but luckily it does not work on me.

@prologic@twtxt.net That was it, now it all works again.

@prologic@twtxt.net even here, in this Yarn, I click “Edit” on my message, or “Reply” on yours, I am still getting this:

Just throwing this out there, but does the edit, delete and reply feature work for any of you, through the website? I can only Yarn. Trying to do those other actions, generates a popup, asking me if I trust some # URL thing. Confirming it refreshes the site, without doing the thing.

@prologic@twtxt.net There are many other examples, centered around how the “enshitification” of their services, negatively impacts everyone: G-Mail randomly blacklisting small e-mail servers, resulting in e-mails ending in some Google void they can’t be retrieved out of (unlike the spam folder); their proprietary Android phone app, mislabelling phone numbers of legitimate businesses, as spam calls and warning people not to pick up; their incompetence in SEO filtering, enabling AI generated adware websites, to be shown above legitimate results.

Roses are red, violets are blue,
Why devs hate Google, and so should you?

Google ☠️ The cloud

Google Drive vs their own API: Many of us developers, go out of our way to support Google Drive in our apps, programs and websites, to make things easier for users, but over the years, Google keeps making it harder and in some cases demanding “solutions”, that conveniently involve us paying their partners:
$Our Android app is frozen in carbonite
$End of the road for Google Drive and Transmit

Google ☠️ The Internet

Google OAuth vs the Canidae browser: Users interested in testing my CEF (Chromium Embedding Framework) browser, back when the project still existed, were prohibited from passing Google OAuth in my and any other CEF browser, unless they changed their user agent string. I managed to contact Google and was told this was a necessary protection against bad actors. As we all know, no bad actor would ever add two lines of code, to change the user agent of their malware.

Google vs the point of SSL: Google Chrome presents all sites access over HTTPS as secure and all sites accessed over HTTP as dangerous. This is very misleading to less educated Internet users, falling for “secure” phishing sites with SSL certificates and avoiding “dangerous” static webpages, that never needed one.

Google ☠️ Android apps

Googles friends vs FOSS
developers: X and other big social media platforms running their own servers, are allowed to host seemingly any user generated content, while Google forces us, developers helping to maintain XMPP clients for Android, to exclude features, that allow our users to discover chatrooms, that anyone can host on their servers. We are thus not only held responsible for what we publish, what we host, but also for the whole XMPP network. I offer my version of the client, unrestricted, on my website, others choose their repo or F-droid.

I share that opinion, but sadly advertisers were completely spoiled, over the years of social media companies bowing down to them. Even if unethical ways of targeting ads were banned, I assume the websites would get paid less.

Now when the pockets of many investors also dried up and they won’t just infinitely pump billions of dollars into an empty promise of mysterious grand future returns (unless AI is involved), sites would have no options, other than squeeze that cash, out of their users.

I know community donations exist, but they’re a model unsustainable for bigger sites and less dedicated communities - furthermore the more sites start begging for donations, the less money there will be to split among them.

The only option that remains, is paid subscriptions and microtransactions, that are already way out of hand, on many sites and I can’t even imagine how hard those would be pushed, if their finances got worse.

I would recommend watching at least the very end of this video, as it explains, how Meta funds “independent advocacy groups”, to fight government regulation, disguised as some social good, open-source, equality, freedom, whatever…

Time for the annual profile picture change. 😅
Second pixelart I drew this year, expecting my least active artist award soon! 💪🏆

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org it’s just a meme comic edit, so no need to worry. 😄 I experimented with it a bit at the beginning, where the images were extremely flawed, but that uniqueness was what I found appealing. Now most of it looks the same and I lost what little interest I had in it to begin with.

The Facebook Messenger Android app user experience:

1. App fails to update, so you have to reinstall it.
   
2. You login and have to accept all the bullish terms of service again.
   
3. The loading wheel gets stuck so you have to restart the app and do it all a second time.
   
4. It tries to download your language and fails, so you have to click “download again” and wait for the app to slowly crunch everything together.
   
5. Now you can finally use the fucking webapp.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m not sure. I never had an Apple device and when this app was briefly broken by Android updates, I sadly wasn’t able to find any good alternative, other than emulating an older version of Android, until a fix came out.

It does worry me a little, because it is this one developer hobby project, that is not opensource, that my ability to properly draw pixelart, relies upon.

@prologic@twtxt.net if you go into the “ART menu” and click /pixel-art/, you get the main folder, where it can all be browsed by file names, but currently without a preview.

If you want more of a gallery thing, check out the backup sites listed under it (also in the “ART menu”, of the main site). Currently you can choose between NextCloud, Gdrive, OneDrive and TeraBox - NextCloud is probably the most accessible option.

@prologic@twtxt.net Thank you. I’m using Pixel Station. I can’t recommend it enough for this kind of pixelart, but it’s only available for Android.

The first and hopefully not last thing I drew this year (drawn yesterday). Kinda minimalistic and Scribble Kibble inspired.

@bender@twtxt.net Idk, it’s gotten to a point, where there is probably 3 or 4 completely different versions of MS Teams. I was on thr Windows version 1.7.00.3653, when the pop-up appeared and now after forcing the downgrade, I’m back on that version again.

The reason, why I demand to be able to continue using this version, is because the one they’re trying to force onto everyone, is not only still janky, but also missing crucial features. Part of my job, is being able to quickly communicate things, in multiple languages. The old version supports that, because it can figure out the language you’re currently using and automatically check the spelling for that language. The new version, only lets you choose one language and does not even support the language, that I use the most. I could probably get the support for that language working, but it would require admins to install language packs, to every machine I use and me going through the settings, every time I need it, to spellcheck the other language.

@prologic@twtxt.net The best part is, that since it is the business version of Teams, they still have to give you the option, to opt-out of this update. To do so, you just have to:

1. Agree to this nonsense and let the app update itself
   
2. Click around the new version for a bit
   
3. Click your profile picture in the top right corner
   
4. Uncheck the “use new version” thingy
   
5. Confirm your choice
   
6. Let the app downgrade itself

Thank you, for giving us a choice Microsoft

People who fight against the use of privacy frontends and bridges, to relay publicly available information, should be mocked for their stupidity. This applies to both salty Twitter bros/YouTubers, fighting it, because they feel entitled to pennies from advertisers and Fediblock jannies, deathly afraid someone using another protocol and a bridge, might read their shit takes and be able to add their opinion, into the discussion.

I’m not in favor of scraping content and/or profiting from it, but that’s something completely different. Especially when it comes to frontends, you’re not entitled to an opt-out - that’s not how that technology works.

The original it is based on:
https://twitter.com/shadmbrooks/status/1755367436873073135

Just an AI generated copypasta, based on an already very pretentious X/Twitter post:

*I asked it to somehow make it even more pretentious

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org their crawler does not read the robots txt and to my knowledge, neither do any other AI crawlers. As always, they considered themselves exempt, from everything they find inconvenient.

@mckinley@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net Yes, I agree the website itself sucks and the company behind it is incompetent at best - even more so, with their other websites.

Their first site (haveibeentrained.com) was offering a way to search through all the training datasets, not realizing, they were full of illegal porn - so it was quickly shut down.

Now their main gimmick is offering a browser extension, that lets you see what data on any given site you visit, was used for AI training, what has already been marked as “opted out” and a way to add your stuff, to that list.

I don’t like that idea either, adding URLs to a list, should not require questionable browser extensions and in general, opting out all the places that might have your images, doesn’t seem worth the time, if the companies, don’t even have to respect this request.

If you just want the txt file, without additional nonsense, feel free to take the default one, that I use here: https://thecanine.ueuo.com/ai.txt and use or edit it, to match your needs.

Those of you who have your own sites, might want to give this a quick look: https://spawning.ai/ai-txt

It’s just a text file, similar to robots.txt, but for AI crawlers, rather than search engine ones. Probably not very effective, as of now, but at least it’s a way to make it clear you don’t conset to your site being used for AI training, without making it suck for human users, in the process.

I’ll have to disappoint you, not properly joining the Christmas profile picture thing, for the second year in the row.

This year in fact countering it, with a profile picture wearing sunglasses. Hopefully at least the Australian users, have my back with this one.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org In this one, the uniform is generic, with a very subtle reference to the Czech flag, on the hat pin.

In the first ever picture of him wearing a uniform, he was wearing some kind of a WWII German airman one:

Neither can be considered his war attire of choice. That title would likely go to this stupid combination of a gold and silver spiked black bandanna, yellow decorated leather jacket, green belt with a heart shaped buckle and a white shirt with a burning tree.

Mythological canines aren’t exactly known for reasonable fashion/war attire. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net No, though some people call him “Jim”, based oh how some of my image files were named, at one point. There were other suggestions (most also beginning with the letter “J”), but this is probably the best one.

A thing from start of this month, that I never posted here:

@iolfree@iolfree Good to know, but if you want to avoid them completely, use either a good front-end (Invideous/Piped), or install the uBlock Origin extension.

ReVanced (or forks of it), NewPipe, GrayJay, VueTube,… can do the trick on mobile.

Mondays sometimes really do be like:

The face of a someone, removed from leading two separate Internet communication protocols/platforms. Here is to many more!

There is not many designers I follow and even less, who I follow ironically. One of them is Peter Arnell, the guy I “admire”, for being able to create stupid shit, write even stupider explanations and sell it to companies, for tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars.

In 2008, his group designed the very logo, that Pepsi used until now and justified its greatness, by 27 pages of the dumbest shit ever put on paper, that I sometimes quote to this day. Sadly all great things, must come to an end.After 15 years of small changes, Pepsi decided, to get rid of the logo completely, along with making their garbage drink, even more unhealthy and pushing the allegedly cancer causing sugar-free version.

I will never have a proper Arnell logo for myself, along with the book of nonsense, that you get with one - especially not after writing this and considering, I probably won’t make that much money, during my entire life. Still in the spirit of great graphical genius Peter Arnell, I humbly submit one sketch of my current logo, with added nonsense, that completely fails to rival his.

If you have any logos, or want to try doing this, with anything I ever drew, please do it now and send me the results - might the spirit of the Arnell design process, never die!

Omg! I’m always playing on those pixel placing canvases, where it’s usually an endless war of factions or just things being attacked for no reason, but now someone did the most wholesome thing imaginable and drew another inugami facing mine and drew them shaking paws.

It’s not going to stay free for too long. GitHub is going to start charging 10$/month per user for personal licenses and double that price, for every corporate employee - source

They also already announced Copilot 365, priced at an even more ridiculous 30$/month/user, for the corpo customers, that 365 package applies to - source

The recommendations page be like:

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci I’m never too serious about code theft, because as developers, we all do a little copying and pasting from SO, or smashing the keyboard, until the code works somehow. Despite that, it’s still bullshit, that this was targeting all the open-source developers, who did not consent and probably also violating all kinds of open-source licenses in the process, yet at the end, it’s the proprietary developers and companies, who profit the most from it, despite contributing nothing, or the bare minimum.

@prologic@twtxt.net Depends, if it can fix the Yarn app.

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
cons:
It takes work
Pros:
Now you get to be the one, sitting in the dark, drinking beer, blasting loud indie music through headphones, writing the edgy READ ME.txt files, you’ve seen included with things, you downloaded as a kid.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s a meme template :D

Oh god, If I don’t repent for my sins and end up in hell - I’m pretty sure part of my punishment will be having to watch the Discord soydevs, attempt to program an Android file picker in RN, for all of eternity - as it will never be accomplished. All while I scream at them in pure agony, far greater than the one caused by my skin melting in lava.

You have to have a photo (cannot be an image, even if the extension is the same) in a specific directory, taken by the phones camera, for this file picker to function. How is code this bad even possible, unless it’s on purpose.

@prologic@twtxt.net Looks like yet another one of those scams, where a custom version of Chat GPT (machine learning at best, in no way even close to real AI), is shoved into a human-shaped torso and presented as FutureBot5000.

Still kinda sad how guy 1, had to invent a woman shaped and voiced android, to have something resembling a woman, he can yell “shut up” at. 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net I really don’t think so, as even Googles attempts to filter out content inappropriate for children failed miserably. As far as I know, the only front-end that even comes anywhere close to your requirements is Invideous, but unless you’re willing to give up child filers and see some trending, you’d probably have to fork it and change quite a few things.

Yes, disabling any and all notifications and sounds is an absolute must.

The Discord app itself used to be at least usable, long before all their stupid redesigns, rewrites, additions no-one asked for and new monetization gimmicks.

DEATH TO INCOMPETENT REACT REWRITES

Well I might be partly biased, because it is the platform, where I’m by far the most popular and one where my bot development and art started. They even reserved “@thecanine” for me.

Still all I wish them is the Skype future and most users moving to better alternatives, like Revolt.chat.

I just got the Windows 11 update, that adds the new folders, volume bar design and some other “features”. I don’t even know how many people have it now, or what kind of an update it was, but I thought it looked alright and didn’t mind it, until Microsoft tried to sneak all the bloatware I spent a day+ removing back in, through some background process, I luckily noticed and quickly destroyed.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci Now we finally know what you look like and that you’re insane - getting your bachelors in math. 🥴

@bender@twtxt.net You’re the first person, to ever tell me that. I was testing the last minor rewrite, along with my friend from US, who had no trouble accessing it and all of my US VPN IPs connect too.

After the recent move, the site is now most likely hosted in the DFW Datacenter, located within the US. That’s not anything new either, as despite being European, I think the vast majority of my stuff, runs somewhere on your continent.

If this isn’t just some temporary outage, you might have to contact your ISP and demand a working service. I’m still checking here, but it doesn’t look like there’s any problems on my end.

@prologic@twtxt.net That is unfortunate, but it probably applies to all heavily pixelated fonts, so if you’re aiming for that aesthetic, you don’t have a more accessible choice.

I only use those fonts on my website, where this issue can be mitigated, by turning off external fonts (in the browser settings), or using a screen reader.

This is not a perfect solution, but knowing that, I try to keep screen reader compatibility a high priority, during site rewrites. Along with making sure, the site looks alright, with the usual default browser fonts.

If anyone remembers my rant, about the strange Club Penguin sequel, that requested very personal information and documents for verification - it somehow got even stranger. I got a couple more e-mails from them, trying to get me to finish my registration, before I set my spam filter, to get rid of future reminders.

For some reason completely beyond my understanding, after a few months passed, their system just automatically assumed that I went through with it and sent me the following e-mail, congratulating me for doing so:

Sure enough, this is not just a “rogue mail server” and my account just somehow works now, without any of the requested info.

I off-course did the responsible thing, clicked the big yellow button and downloaded the apk file onto my primary phone, installed it and gave it the requested permission, to install other things. It installed the promised Club Penguin sequel “Party Parrot World”, that still despite being a separate thing, could only be launched through the original app, that was called “Hideaway”.

To cut it “short”, it is a “technically functional multiplayer game”, in the loosest definition of all those words. It barely even loads and clicking almost anything breaks it. I have only seen a glimpse of one other player for a second, so I’m not even sure, it wasn’t some NPC, missplaced there by one of the many present bugs. Lastly there just wasn’t anything to do, besides walking around, going through the buggy menu, that usually broke the “game”, so much it had to be relaunched, or trying to find “minigames”, that either said coming soon, or were not playable on mobile.

I might still return to this thing down the line, out of pure curiosity, but a masterpiece it is not.

@adi@twtxt.net That one is also nice, but not all too pixely. Don’t even know if I’d consider it a pixelated font, rather than just a “low resolution looking” one. 🤔

@adi@twtxt.net Depends on what you’re looking for. If you want something a little bigger, but still very pixelated and don’t mind it only supporting English.
You can take the one used on my site( https://thecanine.ueuo.com )

You should keep in mind, that it’s more or less ripped from “Hypnospace Outlaw”, so probably not good for commercial use.

A smaller, most languages supporting and more commercially usable pixelfont is “uni05_53” by Craig Kroeger.
Sadly the version of this font, listed on the vast majority (if not all) font sites, includes a small error, that makes it unusable, for some European languages.

A fix for that was made by me, after getting Craigs permission, so if you like this font, it’s better to download my version of it, from: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vEXYneABo6tAXdz2e0Er915uiiP5aFh-/

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s just floofy hair and big ears.

@prologic@twtxt.net Twitter has ditched the bird logo, in favor of the uni code character “𝕏”.

The company behind it is now called “X Corp.” and the site can also be accessed, by going to https://x.com .

Once the rebrand is finished, the site will just be called “X”, with “the everything app” as the new tagline/slogan.

Dumb (but related) shitpost, made by me: https://youtube.com/shorts/GxeYI7ZBdk4?feature=share

New profile picture. 🎉

Can’t wait until this site joins the trend and becomes “y.com” - the everything protocol.

🥁 The dumb shit of the day award goes to:

*yes this also breaks alternative front-end and people without an account, can’t even use the “real site”, at all.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org for sure, I also block ads wherever possible. What Opera does now (among other things), is sponsor creators/“influencers” to talk about it, pays to show up, on top of browser-related Google searches and occupies the tiny amount of ad space, that I do not block, to help cover some projects server costs.
But to be transparent, some of that is surely targeted at me, only because I was researching it - and the Google spyware somehow noticed.

Now I want to give Pulse browser a fair try. It’s still in alfa, but it’s one of the few forks of Firefox, that try to change and simplify things, offer a bit of a unique look and it comes with Ublock origin built-in.

Deleted Bluesky, to once again, post here exclusively. When do I get the 50 million exclusivity contract, to keep me here, or at least a new version of the app?

Opera browser: my final disavowal

While the Internet is being flooded by a record amount of Opera ads, affiliate program members and new hardcore defenders, while I - as someone, who has been using it without a break, for more than 10 years, have had enough and I’ve finally decided to uninstall it.

Part of the reason for this decision, was the new Opera One UI update, that I not only found incredibly ugly and uninspired, but also worsening the already abysmal performance of the browser, as well as adding to the already gigantic pile of bugs within.

All of this, came after a few very frustrating weeks, where the browser constantly crashed, under the weight of its own AI bloat. Every time any text was selected, it was trying to load some ridiculous AI integrations on top, but always crashing and loosing all the opened tabs.
After the UI update, the whole browser somehow felt even more wonky and laggy.

Even for those, who might be fans of the new UI and all the added “features”, that now include a built in generic anime girl game and stupid cartoon noises, upon clicking almost anything, in the “gaming version” of this browser, the growing concerns about this browsers spyware-like connections, to all kinds of mysterious servers, should at least be considered and looked into further. Not to mention the extra problems, that come with them being a Chinese-ran company, storing this data in China.
Quick summary: https://youtu.be/NV8akIgfDqQ

Int the interest of brevity, I won’t go further into the pointless social media arguments they engage in, their past promoting predatory loans, them inserting affiliate links (to the sites you visit through tiles), running a very questionable free VPN service, hidden extensions, that cannot be removed and god knows what else.

Either way Opera, you were an alright browser - many, many years ago. Sadly all I can say now, is “rest in piss, you won’t ever be missed!”.

Experiencing some “red screen of death”

@prologic@twtxt.net …and looks like a teenagers MySpace page, with the big emojifilled randomly colored text, with “Relatable Memes” TM, after every single sentence.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci Like it or not (it’s also a “not” in my book), that’s the direction, most search engine are heading. It’s also heard to imagine it being illegal, because they’ve been scraping and letting you search images for decades and won the lawsuit, they got into by scanning and scraping books.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci I’m 99% sure, that won’t be the case. I’d be really surprised, if the instances, willing to host illegal content, weren’t somehow blocked by default.

Even the sites hosting gore and archiving illegal shooting cams, always have an effective way to remove illegal pornography. If anyone made a site without that option, no-one would ever want to host it and the only users happy to stay on it, would be pedophiles.

There are a few Mastodon instances like that, made by and for pedophiles, hosted in places with loose laws, but they’re completely defederated, even from those ran by “free speech absolutists”, as well as the few, straigh up advocating neo-nazism.

@xuu Thank you for the info. I definitely wouldn’t mind one, despite originally wanting to join, through some other instance. Since they’re also promising seamless instance switching, this should hopefully be a non-issue.

So the news is telling me, Bluesky is the hottest new decentralized thing, with parole waiting month to join, or buying invite codes of ebay, for thousands of dollars.

Yet there’s not one other instance out there, for people to join this decentralized paradise. Idk, just sounds a little sussy to me.

I know there was stems.social, but when people tried joining it, they cried “abuse” and shut it down - so no, it doesn’t count.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Quite a few people do. It’s not even that hard, as you can fill them retroactively - there’s even tutorials, like this one: https://dev.to/codesandtags/how-to-generate-pixel-art-in-your-github-activity-2e6k

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci I’ve looked into it myself and funnily enough, the best take might have been some random comment, saying it’s only popular, because it’s invite only and people are having trouble getting in.

Further, as there are not many actual users, people seem to be projecting all of their hopes and dreams onto it, while waiting in the endless joining line, or falling for “pay for invite” scams. Yes, those somehow exist and cost anywhere from 20 to 100$ - no refunds.

Sure, it’s still not exactly ethical and probably not even legal, in some cases, but at the end of the day, it’s at the very least something.

Something, that makes me think, that there could have been a scenario, where it was a voluntary community project, developers would gladly contribute some of their code and advise to - like some of them are already doing elsewhere.
Even with “art generation”, if credit was properly given and the thing showed all the artists, the final peace was inspired by and where to find and support them, it might have had a way warmer welcome.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci Hard to say when exactly the downfall started, but there were many strange moments, in the last few years. There was the new ownership, some developers jumping ship and starting Vivaldi Browser, the whole company getting caught, for offering predatory loans, to Android users in poorer countries, in 2020 (https://www.engadget.com/2020-01-19-opera-accused-of-predatory-loan-apps.html),...

But at last, they found some success, with their gimmicky Opera GX “gaming browser”, they still pay youtubers to promote and I guess the promoted content within.

They also came up with a free VPN integration, that they later monetized and started taking pretty much every partner, willing to pay them, to get integrated into their main browser - an offer most appealing to small crypto/web 3.0 projects, trying to appear more promising, by having a browser company on board.

Quite predictably, the introduction of Chat GPT, has led to even more browser bloat. 🎉

Also since I’m already bringing up opera - I have genuinely no idea, what their dev team is smoking, as all their additions this year, have been this desperate:

From some cashback scam and TikTok integration…

…all the way to some “lonely men bait” and adding NFTs - a full year, after everyone stopped caring.

@marado@tilde.pt That’s all true, but to play the devils advocate for a moment, how many people here, ever even heard about JPEG-XL until now, or used it in any way?

My twtxt fork will only include nicknames, profile pictures, a thing that livestreams you whenever you open it and the upvote and downvote buttons - under every stream.

I’ll call it “Yarn.Anti-social” or “Blog TV”, since we all remember, how great this idea, worked the first time around. 😅

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci I think it recording the outside of the car, was known for a long time. Likely since they came up with that not so great self-driving project, that led to the need for a lot more data to improve it.

Sadly, people in tech, talking shit about their customers, doesn’t surprise me either. Not saying it’s excusable, I’ve just seen it happen, at many places, in the past.

The one thing, that surprises me, is it recording the inside. Even I, with all me skepticism, would still expect some bare minimum of privacy, when it comes to the things I’m doing and conversations I’m having, inside my own car.

Can we get a folder, for all the new android Yarn App builds, or something like that, so most users don’t have to be stuck, on this ancient version please?

I still have great memories, of playing Club Penguin as a child, or even playing it on a few private servers, at times, as a nostalgia-filled adult, after Disney destroyed and took down the original. Sadly most of those servers were either too obscure, broken, or not obscure enough, to avoid Disneys lawyers.

I was mildly excited, when I heard about a 3D sequel, made by some of the people, behind the original game (before Disney bought it), but this is suspicious at best.

Even if you made the funny penguin game from my childhood, I will not give you my social security number, nor my credit card info, to play the new one and I hope not many others will either.

*The sequel is called “Party Parrot World” and requires a “verified Hideaway account”, if you want to play it, or try some other two game things, that they are currently working on.

I said, I don’t want to hear any more Trump news, but seeing he’s still seething in all caps and some invalid characters, on his isolated bootleg site, made me chuckle.

The only way, this could get more pathetic, is if he starts spamming 5 emojis, after every word. 😂

To my surprise, some AI companies, might have to face the consequences of their art theft afterall. While the legal and corporate world, still couldn’t give less of a shit about the small artists, stability ai made the critical mistake, of using the ever so precious bland and generic stock images. Those are owned by companies, who for obvious reasons, hate AI, have extremely deep pockets and access to the right kind of lawyers.

They also have one other key advantage, that could win them the case. By slapping their watermark on millions of images, in the exact same place, the AI will start putting distorted versions of it, onto some images. Therefore, they can argue damage to their reputation, with evidence, to back it up.

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66788385/getty-images-us-inc-v-stability-ai-inc/